Rob Bell Quotes

Be patient. Don't force your experiences on others. The moving of spirit is a great mystery, and how or why or when certain people wake up is beyond us. Let people have their own experiences.

Because when you can’t hear the cry, when you stop caring for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you, it always leads to the diminishing of your empire.

But it isn’t a choice, because Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, the life. If you come across truth in any form, it isn’t outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Chri...

Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else's life and how it compares with yours.

Eternal life then is a certain kind of life I am living more and more now and will go on forever.17 I am living more and more in connection with God, and I will live connected with God forever. This h...

First, the Bible has to be interpreted. When someone says they’re just doing what the Bible says to do, they didn’t greet you with a holy kiss, they’re probably wearing two kinds of fabric sewn togeth...

For Jesus, the question wasn’t, How do I get into heaven? but How do I bring heaven here?

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You’re a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you’re one of them.

I am for you. I've got your back. I am committed to your best. Help me understand things from your perspective. What can we do together to change things?

In the religious version, you’ll often hear that when this happens, one group heads to a good place, and the rest of humanity heads to a bad place. (The people who tell this version of the story are a...

It is possible for religious people who see themselves as God’s people to resist the forward-calling of God to such a degree that the larger culture around them is actually ahead of them in a particul...

It’s in that place that we’re reminded that true life comes when we’re willing to admit that we’ve reached the end of ourselves, we’ve given up, we’ve let go, we’re willing to die to all of our desire...

Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.

The story is like the other stories about gods demanding acts of devotion and obedience. Gods who are never satisfied. The first audience for this story would have heard this before—it would have been...

There is a difference between details and clutter. Clutter is the books on your shelf that you’re never going to read, the stacked-up papers that have been untouched for months, the endless flotsam an...

This is one of the reasons we watch movies, attend recovery groups, read memoirs, and sit around campfires telling stories long after the fire has dwindled down to a few glowing embers. It’s written i...

Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has...

Whatever we say about God always rests within the larger reality of what we can’t say; meaning always resides within a larger mystery; knowing always takes place within unknowing; whatever has been re...

Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it.

Which leads to another question: When Matthew tells us that some of Jesus’s followers doubted, does this undermine the story, or is this the exact kind of honesty that reflects how people actually are...